In 1774 lord Monboddo, a Scotch jurist, hazarded the proposition that man is but a highly <levelope(l baboon — a proposition whieli has since made his name the laugh- ing-stock of the literary world. About the close of the last century two French philoso]iliers (l)e Maillct and La Marck) endeavored to establisli the proposition that all the higher orders of animals and jilants have been derived, by the immutable laws of nature, from the first- born and lowest items in the scale of jibysical life; and that life itself is producible, by the agency of caloric and electricity, from dead matter. They also held that all the qualiiies and finictions of animals have been devel- oped by natural instinct and a tendency to progressive improvement; and that organization was the result of function, and not function of organization. Their the- ory of life, therefore, was that the zoophyte, which was developed out of something still more simple, expanded
SPECIES
OIG
SPECIES
itself into a moUusk or crustacean ; that the crustacean | was at'vilo(K'il into a tish, tishos into reptiles and birds, and these ai;iiin into quadruped mammals, and the mam- I nial into man.
riiis theorv, so dishonoring to tJod and deijrading to man, was at once njected as an alisurdity by the com- mon-sen,-e of mankind. It was, however, revived, with a little variation, by the author of The Vfst'ujes of the Sntuiiil /iijitori/ of Creation (^Lond. 1844), who in that work reviewed the whole world of life which has been supplied by geology and natural history, and insists that ••the various organic forms that are to be found upon the earth are bound up in one— a fundamental unity [lervades and embraces all, collecting them from the humblest lichen up to the higliest mammifer in one system, the whole creation of which must have dejjend- e'd upon one law or decree of the Almighty, though it did not all come forth at one time. The idea of a sep- arate creation for each must appear totally inadmissi- ble:" and be argues that '"the wbolc train of animated beings, from the simplest and oldest up to the highest and most recent, are thus to be regarded as a series of advances of the principle of development, that have de- pended upon external |)hysical circumstances to which the resuliing animals are appropriate." As to the ori- gin of vitality, he suggests that the first step in the cre- ation of life upon tliis planet was a chemico-electric operation, l)y which simple germinal vesicles were pro- duced, and that the advance from the simplest form of being to the most comjilicated was through the medi- um of the ordinary process of generation. But in a few years the experiments of naturalists exploded that the- ory.
These speculations, whimsical and absurd in concep- tion, but at the same time most mischievous in tenden- cy, have therefore long since been rejected by the most enlightened of our philosophers, basing their arguments on purely scientific principles and inductive reasoning. Prof. Sedgwick, in his jireface to the studies of the Uni- versity of Cambridge, p. cxxviii, has declared that ge- ology, "as a plain succession of monuments and facts, offers one firm cumulative argument against the hy- (Mithesis of development." Agassiz, Cuvicr, and Hugh Miller have been equally strong in their condemnation of the theory of the transition of species.
The discussion of this question has been recently re- vived by ihe publication of Dr. Darwin's On(/iii of Spe- rifs. In this work an attempt has been made to solve the mystery of the creation of life by seeking to estab- lish the pro|iosition that every species has been pro- duced by generation from previously existing species, Darwin's hypothesis (for it is nothing more) is, that, as man, acting on the princi|de of selection, causes different animals and plants to produce varieties, so in nature there is a similar power of selection, originated and car- rierl on by the struggle of life, which tends to produce ind jxTpetiiate, by the operation of a natural law, vari- eties of organisms as distinct as those which man cre- ates among domesticated animals and plants. It must Ik! conceded that, by the principle of natural selection, we can account for the origin of many varieties of the Dame s[)ccieH; but (hat is far short of the proposition that an ai-ciimidation of inherited varieties may con- cliliilc a sp<-(ilic difference. No facts have yet been es- tablished to warrant the inference that because man ran produce varieties of species by selection among do- mcHiicated animals, he could pnxhice, or that nature has pnxluced, by the application of the same priiici- ple, CMHcntially distinct specries. There has always, in the case of d<imeslicaled animals and plants, been a lim- it to man's power to proihice variilies, in like manner as, in the operations of nature, the sterility of hybrids has raiM-d a barrier against the multiplication of spe- cies which caimot be passed.
Darwin believes that animals have descended from at in<»t tmly four or five progenitors, and adds that analo- gy would lead him one Htej) further, viz. to the belief
that all animals and plants have descended from one prototype, and that " the probability is that all the or- ganic beings that have ever lived iqion the earth have desceniled from some one primordial form into which life was first breathed." This admits that life has been pro(hiced upon our planet by one, if not more, divine creative fiat; and such being the case, it is more rea- sonable, as well as more natural, to account for the ap- pearance of distinct species from time to time by the exercise of similar acts of divine power than b}' a vain endeavor to link together animals in relationship l)y de- scent that are wholly dissimilar in organization, and in all tlie habits, propensities, and instincts of their lives.